I'm not a paying customer of or affiliated with Surge—just a happy user.<p>Surge is what I've always wanted to when I do frontend development for fun and learning. This is especially true if you're new. When you're new, you don't want to set up a server to push to Heroku or Digital Ocean, you may not want to use GitHub pages, or other alternatives (not aware of all, just the ones I mentioned). You may still be new to git and git-based deployments.<p>Surge is simple: `surge -p build` will upload the `build` directory and give you a nice HTTPS URL to share with your friends. `surge` does the same with the current directory. You can pick a URL under their domain or use one you own. It all takes a few seconds. Perfect for portfolios, demos, etc.<p>If you use npm you can `npm install --save-dev surge` and add a script that does your production build step and then calls surge to deploy it.<p>Very underrated service!
Nice service, but too expensive to be honest.
My static websites (built with middleman) are hosted in Amazon S3 as a static website bucket and have a Cloudfront distribution in front of it. I use `middleman s3_sync` to deploy the build in one command and it takes care of everything, even Cloudfront invalidation. All for just a few pennies per month.<p>Anyway, keep up the good work.
One of the testimonials:<p>"From now on, I think I'm going to strive to build all my apps as fully static sites."<p>What? I can understand the idea of not overcomplicating an app when you don't need to, but how does this goal make sense for anyone who wants to build anything non-trivial?
If you're interested in setting up something similar on AWS, you could take a look at Stout [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://stout.is" rel="nofollow">http://stout.is</a>
I don't work directly with Surge but the other developers where I'm at have found Surge to have too much downtime and we're moving off of it now. Maybe in the future they will have a more reliable service, but right now you'll definitely experience the growing pains of a new tool.
Very nice. Services like this can help keep the costs and maintenance of smaller projects to a minimum. I myself created a proof-of-concept online programming judge without any server (see <a href="http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/2016/05/12/javascript-online-hosting-static-site-cheaply" rel="nofollow">http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/2016/05/12/javascript-online-...</a>). I only used Google Cloud Platform and Cloudflare at virtually no cost.<p>I wish they had some minimal features that you'd need a server for. I'd pay $5-10/mo to get some basic authentication, custom headers, and maybe even some sort of user-specific key-value store.
I've been using neocities.org for the same purpose, compile a web app, signup for an account, and drop the assets.<p><a href="https://3d3d3d.neocities.org/" rel="nofollow">https://3d3d3d.neocities.org/</a>
Love Surge so much. The CLI interface is stellar. We use it for testing feature branches of frontend code. Writing a tool to automatically spin up an environment for every pull request (alongside the CI). Helps the whole team test new features without having to pull down the branch and review locally.
I mean, if you're doing a static site you can also use github pages with a simple push command. Is there some difference between surge and doing this that I'm not seeing?
Interesting idea for making kind of a PaaS for static websites.<p>I have been using a Firebase Hosting [1] (provides free https, CDN, CLI publish with `firebase serve`) for a while. Obviously, Firebase quotas and pricing is way another but I am curious how do you compare Surge to Firebase Hosting?<p>[1] <a href="https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/" rel="nofollow">https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/</a>
See also <a href="https://www.netlify.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.netlify.com/</a> ... Not sure on exact differences between the two, maybe someone who's used one or the other can chime in?
Another interesting competitor is PubStorm
<a href="https://www.pubstorm.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pubstorm.com/</a><p>Their price is TBD, but they have a cool "quick and easy revert" feature.
As a web developer I feel sometime solution like that remove the understanding of how the internet works. This script can be replaced by a tiny shell script, that runs a rsync of the dev folder to your server, and I think it is important to know basic scripting like that even for a front end dev. I have to say that I haven't tried the script but I haven't seen anything impressive from the presentation video.
Is there a difference between what Surge offers versus ngrok?<p>(Genuinely curious, not trying to imply that "this has been done before" or shouldn't exist!)
Along similar lines I have been playing with Bitbucket Pipelines and Hugo to build static websites on commit and deploy them to S3 buckets. Really like the way they use docker containers as build agents, it's very tidy: <a href="https://github.com/rabidgremlin/hugo-s3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rabidgremlin/hugo-s3</a>
grumble: they mention git hooks (and if you click on the description they are RCS agnostic) but they use the octocat logo.<p>Just yesterday I mentioned that I was using git and my gf assumed I meant github. She (not a developer) thought that git was a product sold by github.
>Free SSL for surge.sh subdomains<p>Wow! Thanks! It's not like I can just get it for free on any domain I like. Not even speaking about servers like Caddy that can do that automatically on launch.